Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday July 23, 2012 @02:48PM
from the original-net dept.

jaymzter writes "The Wall Street Journal is running an article that it claims seeks to dispel an urban legend about the internet: 'The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet.' The position of the piece is that it was Xerox's contribution of Ethernet that enabled the global series of tubes we know and love today, and what's interesting is that the former head of DARPA supports this claim."

A general wiring specification is hardly on a level playing field with creating the internet. That's like saying Xerox's mouse created the PC. A nice piece of the puzzle perhaps, but not credit-worthy.

Why exactly do we need to pay continual homage to Xerox? To create more urban legends instead of dispel and dismiss them?

In this case, it's because Barack HUSSEIN Obama (D-Kenya) gave credit for the Internet to the gov't. So OF COURSE the Wall Street Journal has to contradict that claim because Barack HUSSEIN Obama can't be right about anything ever-- especially when it comes to claims that the gov't did something good.

If Obama said the sky was blue, the WSJ would undoubtedly publish a story questioning it. Why, just the other night the sky was pitch black! Is there nothing Obama won't lie to the American people about?

The actual quote was "I took the initiative in creating the internet" which is arguably wrong and (my opinion) a monstrous conceit.

Again, that's actually half the quote.

But it does illustrate the point that if you're gonna rag on someone, be certain of what he actually said.

You don't say.

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Since Gore was speaking from the perspective of a member of the legislative branch, and that the legislation he sponsored opened up NSFNET to commercial development (just a wee bit relevant to the development of the Internet), his claim was entirely fair to make.

You're right, and that's the reason we need to be precise in our language. Gore detractors continue to say "Al Gore said he invented the internet", and Gore apologists continue to counter, with technical accuracy, that he did not say that. You point out that "I took the initiative in creating the internet" has essentially the same meaning, but most people haven't done the research necessary to know the exact quote.

Parenthetically, there is a good chance that he simply blew his lines during the interview. Had he said "I took the initiative in co-authoring legislation to fund some of the backbone hardware in the newly emerging internet", his detractors wouldn't have had a lot to say. (In some cases, because they did not understand what he had just said.)

It's been my experience that most of his detractors (at least the ones I've met) are absolutely resistant to understanding the nuances involved in what he said, let alone what he meant, and seem to be bent on clinging to the narrative that supports their notion that Al Gore is nothing more than a buffoon.

"I took the initiative in creating the internet" is not technically sound.

Except that it is, of course. Gore sponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992, which opened NSFNET to commercial development. This was kind of a Big Deal in turning a small government network into the Internet with millions of hosts, so his claim was 1000% reasonable to make.

That Al Gore took the initiative in creating something that already existed.

He could have been more clear and specific. But exactly which part of his statement if demonstrably, factually incorrect?

That Al Gore took the initiative in creating something that already existed. "Create" implies that he knowingly took some action that caused an object to exist that previously did not. He did not do this.

It's true in the same way that Apple "created" the smartphone market. No they didn't invent the smartphone from scratch. Yes, there were earlier phones with most of the features of an iPhone. But they undeniably did start the boom in smartphones. (And, no, I don't like Apple and don't have an iPhone).

IBM/Intel/Microsoft didn't invent or create the PC, but they certainly were the ones responsible for it reaching a certain critical, (or rather popular and affordable) mass.

In this case, it's because Barack HUSSEIN Obama (D-Kenya) gave credit for the Internet to the gov't. So OF COURSE the Wall Street Journal has to contradict that claim because Barack HUSSEIN Obama can't be right about anything ever-- especially when it comes to claims that the gov't did something good.

The final answer is: Government invented the internet, no matter what the dangerously right-wing Wall Street Journal falsely believes.

Seriously, the WSJ loves business too much. It needs to learn that business are the MOST dependent on government. The richer you are, the more dependent you are on government, since a larger portion of your wealth derives from government activities.

A poor person does not need a highway system, schools, or an army. Poor people do not give a fuck.

A rich person needs a highway so their employees can get to work and deliver products to customers. They need schools so their employees can read instructions. They need armies to control resources. They need courts & police to enforce these rules.

ALL of government was designed to make people rich, and this is why we liberals tax the wealthy more than the poor. It used to be a nice 70% income tax rate for the rich, before Reagan gave all the dumbassess a false sense of hope that they too can be rich if they work hard. Um no, not everyone can be rich. Dumb people cannot be rich, no matter how hard they work. And, rich people need to pay the benefits of dumb people, so that they can continue to be rich.

The smaller government, the poorer the people. The bigger the government, the richer the people.

Meanwhile, the worst part is the SEO-optimized headline "Who really invented the internet" that'll cause Googlers to reach this page, falsely thinking that businesses somehow invented the internet. Someone really needs to un-SEO this article.

The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?

The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?

I pose a question in response to your question: What about the business in Somalia that never got off the ground because there were no clean roads, no mail service, and the bribes to keep the warlords from stealing all of your good and killing your workers is too high.

The fact is, without the fundamentals, establishing a successful venture is astronomically more difficult - how many successful large-scale businesses existed in the middle ages (which is pretty much what Somalia looks like today, but with modern weaponry)?

Yes, the successful business owner deserves credit - just nowhere near as much as Wall St. (and their lackeys in office) think they do. Take that same business, move them to Somalia (hell, even some run down parts of major metropolitan areas), and give them a week or two before the venture completely implodes.

Completely agree as I believe everyone agrees. The point is that the originial context of the argument is to justify a higher rate of taxation on the successful business based on the fact that the government is the reason that the business is successful yet everyone enjoys the same infrastructure whether you are successful or not.

There are many reasons to have a progressive tax structure (and many reasons not to). Being successful at your business is not one of them. To argue that the owner's blood, s

Score 5 funny, Score 100000 true. I think Obama should just start reading from the Republican Party Platform instead of giving speeches. "Read my lips, no new taxes" should be his slogan. The right wing would suddenly be in favor of new taxes and gun control.

I think Obama should just start reading from the Republican Party Platform instead of giving speeches. "Read my lips, no new taxes" should be his slogan. The right wing would suddenly be in favor of new taxes and gun control.

It's already happened, numerous times.

The White House presented a bill to congress asking for tax cuts for small businesses that hire US workers. It's something that was in the official GOP platform in 2010. Republican leadership in the House of Representatives refused to put the bill up for a vote. It was defeated, entirely on partisan votes, by the GOP-controlled committee it was brought before.

As Norm Ornstein, the conservative scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote in his most recent book, the Republican party has become "an insurgent outlier" which is "at war with its own government". Mr Ornstein makes it clear that the blame for the inability of our current government to address even the most basic issues lays entirely on the heads of the GOP. And that is why Mr Ornstein is no longer invited to the Sunday morning news talk shows. He used to be a regular on those shows, but opinions such as his do not fit the moral equivalence that the mainstream media prefers, where "both sides" are equally to blame.

Of course, Mr Ornstein, who has been given awards by conservative groups, had been hailed as one of the intellectual greats of the American conservative movement, is suddenly an horrific traitor to the Right.

Its eve worse for WSJ. While US government invented and financed underlying protocols (100%, no private company was involved), Web was invented by socialist (that is by European standards, which is more like "communist" for USA) research institute CERN, consuming billions of taxpayer dollars like there is no tomorrow. And on top of that, guy that invented WWW was not even doing anything related to his job (physics) that he was paid for by HARD WORKING TAXPAYERS, he was researching unrelated computer hyperte

Obama is the typical college professor who knows a lot of facts and information and theory, but very little real world knowledge. President Woodrow Wilson had the same flaw. (And also lied that he would not take us to war.)

Obama, like Clinton, are 2 of the very few US presidents who came from *nothing* families (alcoholism, dissociated family life, working class at best). Look what they each achieved in their lives. Meanwhile the Bushes and now Romney were born into US$ multimillionaire political families and never had to fight or work to get anything. I ask you this: Look at what you are in life. What have you achieved? My bet is you're still living in the basement playing games. As to Obama's "real world" experience, he has lived many places, seen the world up close. In contrast you probably haven't been out of the basement much. In your 3 short sentences you have shown your total ignorance, and there is no one alive without "flaws" including you... Had you achieved anything your sig wouldn't be "HP Desktop with i7 at 3GHz/8GB versus Dell i5 at 3GHz/12GB. To buy or not to buy?" You'd be able to afford both and a few more. In my home office I have 4 different computers doing different jobs surrounding me, and 2 more around the house (kitchen and bedroom) plus 5 "retired" computers in a closet (all of which still work). Get off my lawn...

I do, however, think Obama is slightly worse than Bush Jr....at least to this point in his stay in office. I certainly hope Obama is a short timer, and doesn't get another 4 years to show that he is much, much worse that Bush Jr.

Perhaps because prior to Ethernet, most communications were either serial, or proprietary. They were the first standard and widely adopted interconnect protocol.

Not really relevant to the 'internet', though. Yes, there were some slow, and/or expensive, and/or dreadful networking mechanisms that were pushed out of the local network scene by ethernet; but the internet's interesting characteristics are all at higher layers in the network model, and can be run on top of all sorts of interfaces without any operationally visible differences. Ethernet pretty much dominates on the LAN side at this point; but large chunks of the internet on a wider area still run on non-ethernet interfaces of various flavors, and IP packets don't give a damn...

At a certain point of abstraction, we could say that there are dozens of ethernet-like specifications. Prior to all that is the idea of "Packet switching" pioneered by ARPANET. CYCLADES is another government funded (France) project using packet switching and with high influence over today's Internet.

Except that ethernet as a WAN protocol didn't emerge until well after the Internet was up and running. The Internet started on serial/TDM protocols, which by the way, were very standardized, albeit with the usual US/euro dichotomy.

That and token ring, token bus, starlan, etc. Ethernet only became standard because it was cheap to wire and good enough. Collision detection in networks prior to ethernet switches was a performance killer.

The male kind is a plastic funnel 2 to 3 inches in width and about 4 inches deep. A male astronaut would urinate directly into the funnel. He would have to keep 2 to 3 inches away to not get sucked into the funnel.

1) I'm sure some astronauts had to keep farther away from it than others2) I'm thinking that on really long missions getting sucked into the funnel might be advantageous... or not.

The solid waste collection bag is a detachable bag that is made of a special fabric that lets gas but not liquid or solid through. This allows the fan at the back of the vacuum chamber to pull the waste into the bag. When the astronaut is done using it, he/she twists their bag and places it in a waste storage drawer.

Sounds like space is absolutely not the place for Big Al after hitting the Golden Corral.

The whole point of the Arpanet layer model is that you could pop any transmission technology you wanted into layers 1 and 2 and you could still get connectivity over disparate networks, providing layers 3 and up could be made to work. Ethernet is certainly common in LANs, but considering you can't get more than 500 feet without boosting signal, it's an absurd claim to state that Ethernet was the start of the Internet.

A general wiring specification is hardly on a level playing field with creating the internet.

Ethernet is not a wiring specification. In fact, there are several types of wiring that can carry Ethernet: twisted pair (most common today), coaxial cable (less common), fiber optic, and possibly others. Ethernet is about the protocols which transport data from one computer to another on the same local area network.

That's true now, but I'd invite you to go back and read the original Ethernet papers from PARC. They describe, among other things, a single (coax) wiring model, with support for up to 256 computers on a single broadcast domain sharing a 3Mb/s channel. Numerous parts of the specification are based on limits of the technology at the time, such as the number of RAM chips it was possible to fit on the board and the I/O speed of the Alto.

The evaluation paper on the Alto, published in 1979, points out that it's possible to imagine a network of thousands of personal computers.

The only truly innovative contribution of ethernet was CSMA [wikipedia.org]. Which, by the way, is now only relevant on the WiFi edge. Don't give credit to ethernet where it is not due. Do give it credit for providing a cheap, PHB-friendly networking technology that was good enough to actually do the job, and flexible enough to be upgraded many times over. Also give it credit for mysteriously succeeding in areas where it sucks balls compared to the alternatives (e.g. laughably bad OAM, chunky scaling increments, no link-level channelization resulting in a litany of encapsulation/MTU problems, no in-band maintainance channel, and absolutely no supportive mechanism for low-latency real-time capabilities.) OK well, scratch that. The success isn't mysterious, it was perfectly sensible if you looked at the prices -- the mystery was really the failure of competing technologies to chase it on price.

Oh, and give PoE credit for being an extremely well engineered, safe, and reliable power delivery add-on. But that's beside the point.

A general wiring specification is hardly on a level playing field with creating the internet. That's like saying Xerox's mouse created the PC. A nice piece of the puzzle perhaps, but not credit-worthy.

Why exactly do we need to pay continual homage to Xerox? To create more urban legends instead of dispel and dismiss them?

...twisted pair? ain't nothing to do with it. ethernet is ether -net. it's just a way to negotiate who transfers. perhaps the argument is that something like token ring isn't as suitable and cheap for large networks.

I guess one could argue that perhaps it still was the government who _bought_ the internet.

Ethernet didn't even link computer networks. It linked computers *into* a network, but with a common collision domain you'd never be able to get more than a hundred computers connected. A few times that with bridges. Ethernet provides the nets which internetworking inters.

Robert W. Taylor was never the head of DARPA. He was, however, the guy who proposed and ran the ARPAnet for DARPA, under Director Charles Herzfeld, until he left to become head of Xerox PARC. (Although he got the idea while J.C.R. Licklider was head of DARPA, Taylor didn't pitch it as an actual, fundable project until Herzfeld took over.)

Taylor absolutely does NOT credit Robert Metcalfe (developer of Ethernet) for the invention of the Internet. Instead, he reserves the lion's share of the credit for himself. I know this, because he called me in 1994 to lecture me about what he felt were inaccuracies in a column I wrote for LAN Times about the origins of the Internet. (Specifically, he objected to my statement that the earlier RAND thought experiment on a nuclear-war-survivable, peer-based, packet-switched network was the basis for the development of the Internet.)

You can read more about Licklider, Taylor, and others who were responsible for the devleopment of the Internet in my December 2000 Boardwatch cover story "They Might Be Giants" [starkrealities.com], if you're interested in the real story, as opposed to the WSJ's warm, stinky piece of journalistic shit.

And the funny bit was Ethernet probably had the least amount to do with making a network of networks. At the time Ethernet was about the least used medium for long distance connections. It took 20 years before Ethernet started being heavily used for long distance connections primarily because it's cheaper not better but DWDM was able to carry it and work around some of it's flaws.

We are talking about the same airline industry that got $5 billion in government bailouts and $10 billion in loan guarantees in 2001? And we are also going to ignore all the chapter 11 bankruptcy filings from airliners, correct?

Last time I used Amtrak (admitted, a few years ago, though fairly regularly at the time) it was cheaper, faster (for a trip across the state) and FAR more comfortable than an airline. And more convenient. And more accessible. And there was better food. And no baggage fees. Basically everything was better. I probably wouldn't do it cross country, but if my choices are Amtrak or a flight, I'm probably picking Amtrak for anything up to ten hours. I'd LOVE to see what it could become if they invested more in it, but it's certainly holding it's own.

I have nothing against the Free Market. Nor have anything against the government. I have something against people who feel that it must be all of one and none of the other, or that either can stand on its own feet, unaided.

Specifically on-topic, There was over a decade of the Free Market thrashing around trying to create "The Information Service." I know, because at various times I used several of them. They all failed, because they all wanted to own the entire pie, and none of them could. The internet walked in and simply wiped them all away. The only way any of them could even dream of surviving was to participate in the internet - to become an internet access point - an ISP. The internet succeeded BECAUSE nobody owned the whole pie, not in spite of it.

In a more enlightened place, maybe industry could have come together and done that. But that's not the USA of the 1980's and early 1990's.

. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished

Nice pro free market puff piece. It is, of course, utter bullshit.

The ARPANET protocols were first created in tail end of the 60's. Rather than languishing, they grew rapidly by the standards of the day, while being fiddled with until the flag day sometime in the early 80's (82?) when the IPv4 protocol was finalised. Since the early 80's, the number of hosts on the global IPv4 network (i.e. the internet) has grown exponentially, with approximately a 10x growth every 4 years.

Airlines, eh? The ones that are operating on wafer thing margins after their bailouts? Flying is kept safer by heavy regulation by the FAA. Aircraft technology is developed not by airlines but by the plane manufacturers, which these days means Boeing and Airbus. Airbus gets government subsidies from its European government backers and Boeing gets the same (in the form of defence contracts) from its US government backers.

If Amtrak had even a fraction of the government subsidies that air or automobile travel was getting right now you'd be zipping between major cities on 120MPH+ trains like they do in just about ever other developed country. Amtrak is suffering because it has to rely on privately owned infrastructure that's held by the freight operators. And still Amtrak is a more comfortable service than any flight or long haul road trip. If it weren't for the slow speed (caused by the rickety state of the primitive privately owned tracks) I'd be using it a whole lot more.

This is what conservatives do. They gut public services to the point where they can't function to their full potential, and they say "look! Told you! Government can't do anything right!" Conservatives spend their time in opposition claiming that government is incompetent, and when they get into office they set about proving it.

Yeah, and both the article and the blogger are wrong. You are spouting BS, and others called you to your wrong Amtrag assertions already.

The Internet took up an exponential growth from the start -- as one of the persons who were technically responsible for connecting European countries to it, I was eye witness. I was employed by a public State University, like most others who did such work, so no free market, government money it was. The general public usage exploded after introduction of the World Wide W

Nice falsehood there, but here's the articles actual thesis, summed up by Blogger Brian Carnell in 1999: "The Internet reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."

Pretty good summation.

No, pretty bad summation, as it glosses over far too many facts.

Firstly, even though IPv4 because the official protocol of the Internet on Flag Day (1983-01-01), the network running then wasn't the Internet as we know it today. DNS didn't exist until 1983 (prior to that, you had to download HOSTS.TXT from a central repository on a regular basis). The first.COM domain name didn't exist until 1985. The Border Gateway Protocol didn't exist until 1989; prior to that GGP/EGP were in use, and only centralized core routers could participate. CIDR didn't exist until 1993; without CIDR we would have run out of IPv4 address space over a decade ago. Gopher didn't exist until 1991, providing the first end-user friendly way to access data on the Internet. The World-Wide Web didn't exist until late 1990 (in a rudimentary form) -- it wasn't until spring 1993 that CERN announced that the World Wide Web's protocols were available without a license, allowing others to develop web client and server software.

Note that ALL of these contributions came from either publicly funded Universities or from government R&D entities. None came from private concerns.

But you know what I remember of private concerns from this time? CompuServe. America Online. Prodigy. Various BBS's. None of which communicated or inter-operated with one another, and none of which were truly global in scale, and all of which were pretty expensive by modern standards. The government funded/developed Internet and W3 virtually completely wiped them all out.

So claiming that TCP/IP languished for 30 years until it became open to commercial enterprise doesn't reflect the reality of the situation. The Internet wasn't ready for commercial entities until less than 20 years ago. With no BGP (orgs couldn't run their own core routers), CIDR (efficient address allocation), or Gopher/WWW (user friendly data access and document linking/application platforms) none of the successful "private interests" would have had any success. Google, Facebook, heck even Slashdot couldn't exist without all of these technologies in place, and they certainly weren't available 30 years ago. At best, it "languished" for 2 years between 1993 and 1995, when it opened to commercial use for the first time.

(Of course, some (myself included) would argue that it's these same "private/commercial concerns" that are holding back the widespread deployment of IPv6 to fix all of the routing and addressing problems inherent in IPv4. I guess free-market commerce isn't the panacea to everything, huh?)

Gov't is a process by which wealth is transferred from people who make it to people who can take it by force.

Or, governmet is a process which stops people without wealth from taking it (by force) from those who make it.

IOW, oversimplyfying is stupid.

The market is concerned with

The market is concerned with nothing. It has not brain, no leader nothing. Everything is an emergent property. When markets are efficient, they have proven to be the best known way of doing things. In other cases, they have failed utterly.

Your q=line about the market being concerned about getting good stuff to people at the best prices is rubbish. There is no concern. The market players are generally concerned with maximizing profit. Often this works well. Someties it does not.

Gov't isn't about making

Government is about the rule of law without which the market as you know it would not exist.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what free market capitalism is. The only problem the players try to solve is how to maximize profit. Often "solutions to problems" emerge, but not always.

Every generation of teenagers thinks they invented sex and music.... and the internet.

We used to laugh at "al gore invented the internet" but the next generation of people will laugh at "zuckerberg invented the internet"

The other problem is there is no "internet". No one thing you can point at. Who invented "the space shuttle" as one individual inventing one object is an equally dumb question.

Another problem is best displayed by analogy. Who invented God? There's 10000 religions all saying they did, and the other 9999 got it all wrong and the 9999 others are all going to hell. Odds are all 10000 got it wrong not just 9999. Or another great analogy, at least to educated people: Who caused the decline and fall of the roman empire?

George Bush!Oooops sorry that was automatic. Um. Julius Caesar's son Octavian when he killed-off democracy by subsuming all power to himself and leaving the People and the Senate powerless. (It then took ~300 years for bad emperors to squander the accumulated wealth & turn a once-vibrant free market state into a feudal state.)

How about this: it was thousands of individuals, working both in the public and private sector on different pieces of the puzzle, when all taken together, who developed the Internet.

And then it gets crazier: if any of those pieces were missing, the same problems would have been present, and they would have been solved in similar but slightly different ways. If not for ARPANET, perhaps Project Xanadu would have yielded a working model, and something like IP would have been developed to make the networking work.

And to top it off: regardless, the state of the Internet at any particular point is largely a function of the available computing power. Moore's Law is highly resistant to challenge, and it's unlikely that any major change of players would have affected the outcome much. My BBS'ing days on a C=64 with a 300-baud modem might have had hypertext in the Xanadu model, but it still would have been an 8-bit experience.

In summary: there are stupid questions, like "who really invented the Internet?"

I think the key is defining the internet. The traditional definition is a connection of disparity networks. To do that, you need two things; A compatible physical connection, and a compatible protocol. Prior to Ethernet, the only connectivity that was remotely cross platform was serial. And even that was not always consistent. Also, prior to TCP/IP, there really was no totally cross platform communication standard. Even serial had issues with endian, and ascii. Oh, yeah... And ASCII too.

TCP/IP is transport neutral. There were plenty of token ring networks back in the day, and quite a few multi-user internet nodes at smaller schools were single minicomputers connected by "high-speed" modem to larger schools that had real networks.

According to Wikipedia, the first two computer networks were connected together (to form an "internet", because that is what the word means) was in 1969, more than 10 years before Ethernet was invented. That means an internet proceeded Ethernet in existence. Ethernet was created as one means of transmitting networked data. It was not the only possibility: dozens of other standards could have been adapted for a de facto LAN standard (note the "LAN" part of that: Ethernet isn't even really part of the Internet per se). It did not invent it, it did not proceed it, and in fact it was not even necessary to the Internet's existence. Hell, the backbone of the Internet is fiber optics, not Ethernet.

Also, I'm a little confused by them calling ARPANET "not an Internet" (not least because "Internet" shouldn't be capitalized in that context), since it was a connection of multiple networks together.

'Internetworking' predated Ethernet by a long shot. One could argue that the UUCP network [wikipedia.org] was the progenitor to or perhaps the first incarnation of the Internet - it had file transfers, email, usenet news [wikipedia.org], and was a loosely-managed, cooperative network of systems across companies, universities, and government. It was mostly modem-based; those with dedicated leased lines were the envy of all.

It was store-and-forward, explicitly routed, and relied on config files like this [mit.edu]. Contained within this example is my UUCP node definition from 22 years ago. I'm not tellin' which one.

Xerox gets full credit for creating the Internet because they created ethernet and other computing ideas? If this is true what prevents me from using the same device to assign all credit to inventors of integrated circuits?

Who did what is no mystery all you need to do is pick an RFC and look at the authors list. RFC 760 and 761 are a good place to start.

As far as nuclear survivability my understanding is this was a mixed bag. Some people were pushing this very meme for political reasons and others had di

Didn't the Ethernet specs solve some problems such as collision sensing, retrys, etc.?

Claiming Ethernet is 'just wiring' misses a big point. Without wiring, the Internet pretty much can't exist. Those three layers are essential. Before Ethernet, the options were a choice between awful and marginal.

SF and S-fact author Bruce Sterling did a fine little "short history" essay back in 1993. It was not only "not just Xerox" or "not just government" or "not just private industry", it was "not just America".

Note that 'Packet' is a very British term - and one of the really, really crucial developments was thinking of communications with packet-switching, not "opening a continuous line between sender and receiver".

It's a classic Wall Street Journal piece: reasonable research and fact-finding, but then they have to put the spin on it. That predates Rupert Murdoch by quite a bit.

Even today, almost none of the connections between Internet nodes are ethernet. Your home broadband connection is not ethernet - it's DSL, cable modem, or fiber. Back in the day when most Internet nodes didn't have dedicated connections, they used dialup modems over POTS, not ethernet. Most dedicated connections used the X.25 network provided by the phone companies for dedicated data lines.

What enabled the Internet was the idea of layering communications [wikipedia.org]. That way your applications saw the same packets coming from the network regardless of whatever software or hardware lay underneath. That is, rather than try to translate TCP/IP packet data into ethernet packet data, then translate that into DSL packet data, etc. for this post submission to get to slashdot, each layer just encapsulates the higher layer's data. So the TCP/IP packets never know they've been split up into 1542 byte chunks to be transmitted along ethernet to reach my DSL modem. They don't know they've been converted into whatever tortured protocol DSL uses, and so on all the way to slashdot's servers.

You just have underlying layers treat the above layers are data streams. Then the higher levels (e.g. apps) can interoperate completely agnostic to what underlying layers are used. Ethernet was one of those underlying layers, so had nothing to do with it. Ethernet's simplicity and versatility had a lot to do with it being adopted at the hardware level for LANs (as opposed to, say, Token Ring), but it had nothing to do with the Internet.

There's a lot of merit in this story I think, but ultimately it muddies the waters. Certainly, it's claim that government-funded research played a less than key role in the development of internetworking seems to be just plain false.

First of all, the work Xerox did that most resembles the Internet protocols was not Ethernet, but PARC Universal Packet (PUP) [wikipedia.org], which is indeed quite directly comparable to the IP in TCP/IP.
Ethernet, while a terrific piece of work, mostly served to facilitate networking within a single site.

The article also says implies that the Government-funded ARPANET wasn't really the precursor of the Internet. I think that's an over-simplification. Arpanet wasn't the very first packet switching network (see the work of Baran and Davies), and it certainly wasn't an Internet (network of networks), but it really was the direct antecedent of the Internet as we know it. Arpanet connected universities and other research establishments. It proved the viability of a packet-switching network with all the application smarts at the periphery of the network. In almost all cases, what had been Arpanet connections among the early sites evolved (sometimes by way of NSFnet) to TCP/IP Internet connections, running essentially the same applications and services. So, in all those ways, Arpanet was a crucial step on the way to our TCP/IP-based Internet, and of course, ARPANET was government funded.

So, the government-funded work on internetworking seems to have started before the Xerox work, and the Xerox research time explicitly cited Cerf and Kahn as sources of inspiration for the Xerox work on internetworking. Wouldn't it be nice of the WSJ article made all that clear before everyone started using these over simplifications to prove the futility of government-funded research?

If you read nothing else, read the first and last paragraphs [following this one;)].They address exactly what the OP brought up and why it is not accurate.

Putting aside for just one brief paragraph whether Ethernet has led to the Internet,Ethernet was developed by DIX - Digital [Equipment Corporation], Intel, and Xeroxin no particular order except that's the name they used. Bob Metcalfe -- cofounderof 3Com -- has lectured about this for ages, Don't confuse the network we usetoday (Ethernet II, 802.3, 802.1q, 10Base-T, 100Base-TX, 1000Base-anything, etc.)with the original Ethernet [I] spec. Always build on the works of other giants.

Now back to the original claims. There were many networking standards, and IP wasjust one of them. Originally computers did not talk to many other computers, evenin the same room. Original DECnet systems would each talk to one or more othersystems, and would relay messages -- much as Usenet did to text.

Ethernet was not the first bus-based network topology. Token-Ring was a strongcompetitor, pushed by the great might of IBM. Debates raged as to which wasbetter, 4Mbps guaranteed-time slots (think like TDMA) or 10Mbps collission-detectcarrier sense multiple access (CSMA) that guaranteed nothing. The rule of thumbwas if you had two "stations" and one was transmitting a bitstream and the otherwas sending nothing you could APPROACH 10Mbps. If the two talked to eachother then 5Mbps, and so on. The advent of full-duplex technology (10Base-T)moved the "bus" into the center of one device (a hub) from which spokes connectednodes. (You'll note that means it really is a star configuration).

Original Ethernet ran on big fat cables. To connect to it you used a big clamp onconnector with a "tooth" that pierced the outer insulation and hit the center conductor.Those were called vampire taps. Ethernet at that point was 10Base5. 10MBps, 500m.Then came "thinwire". Using BNC connectors, T-s for taps, and dual-connectors toextend, 10Base2 got us 10Mbps at 200m. That was pretty much it.

Aside: around this time someone thought to resurrect token-ring but make it useexpensive glass fiber that needed expensive splicing -- to power the "desktop!"This 100Mbps network was Fiber Distributed Data Interface.

Anyway so now we come to the part where we havea. IP and TCP/IPb. A bus-based network to allow many to many communicationAnd thus the ARPANET was born. It wasn't to fight a war, it was to do research.The US military -- reporting to the same US DoD that funded ARPA -- thought itwas such a great idea they created a network called MILNET.

The Internet did not exist because computers in one room could talk to each othervia Ethernet. It exists because that one room could talk to ANOTHER ROOM ina far away place. Internet means "Interconnected Networks". One Ethernet inplace A talking to one Ethernet in place B.... now THAT's interconnection.

2) Lots of other people and organizations developed lots of networks. ARPANET between University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (funded by ARPA). There was also privately operated Telenet & Tymnet, and university lead MERIT networks as well as UUCP started at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

3) I worked for one of the first private Internet Service Providers - tt was also one of the first providers of dial-up shell accounts, and later had one of the first national DS-3 IP networks. When I started cold-calling people for web design, they often told me "My customers will never use the Internet" (if they even knew what the Internet was). Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.

Also look at private companies like Cisco that made IP routing practical at large scales.

So I will 100% agree that government funding of university researchers created the Internet. However it would have never gone anywhere without private money funding a massive expansion and buildout of it.

Think university solar cell research funded by the government - good. Solyndra funded by government - bad.

And it would have also gone NOWHERE if government tried to regulate early ISPs as roughly as it regulated the incumbent telecommunications companies. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted with little regulation or censorship.

you mean like the interstate and highway system? sure the government stole the idea from the Germans, but hey road networks have been around for ever.. i'm sure some company would have built them, in an open manor for that allowed for all companies to benefit from shared use and upkeep..

This is a WSJ Online article in the Opinion section. So, it's one of many blogs, essentially, under the WSJ name. The standards for the real Wall Street Journal and for their online-only content (particularly the Opinion section) are dramatically different. The online-only content is absolutely terrible.